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Topic: 1.502 First Impressions (Read 2059 times)

I think that maybe just giving the Deep Blue a 200 energy starting capacity might be best. Removing multiplier stuff completely? Or would you prefer a change to x1.5?

Personally, I think losing the ability altogether would be unfortunate. Even though it was an unintended effect at first and it is extra work for balancing, it did give Deep Blue something unique that can change the way you play in a very concrete way.

I think that maybe just giving the Deep Blue a 200 energy starting capacity might be best. Removing multiplier stuff completely? Or would you prefer a change to x1.5?

Personally, I think losing the ability altogether would be unfortunate. Even though it was an unintended effect at first and it is extra work for balancing, it did give Deep Blue something unique that can change the way you play in a very concrete way.

I would be very interested to see how you dodge 2 Anangu boomerangs that are wider than the hallway you're currently in . While there may always be a way out, the question is, how long does that way out last, and what level of skills are required to recognize that way out and use it. The point that I had (poorly) been trying to make is, the skills and reflexes that are required to use those ways out on beta normal are skills primarily developed by playing more of the bullet-hell and 1-hit-kills-you shmups that few people play. Before, using the ways out on normal only required skills and reflexes developed in much broader video game categories, like FPSs and RPGs, allowing a much broader appeal. This is in line with how most other games do their difficulty levels: easy/super-easy is new to gaming, normal is experienced gamer new to the genre, and hard/ultra-hard is experienced with the genre. Obviously everyone is different, so there are probably people who would be happy putting in 100 hours on super-easy, but those are the general guidelines most games with variable difficulty go by to make sure players get a consistent experience., and straying away from that seems like a bad idea.

Missiles seem to be in place to counteract this by allowing players to make their own ways out, which sounds good on paper; however, in practice, recognizing that you messed up and you're in a situation that requires you to use a missile requires nearly the same amount of forethought as recognizing and using those small ways out in the first place, so they aren't really effective at solving the problem.

- Increase starting player health across the board a little to survive early floors

- Decrease the gains from health boosts, so players cannot possibly end with ~30 health more than they started (I realize health gains from shards change by difficulty, but the vast majority of my health gains were from items)

- Increase player base damage, so they can more easily defeat early floor enemies

- Further decrease gains from damage boosts, so players cannot steamroll later floors

- Find a way to make sure the player has an opportunity or two to get a new weapon before they leave floor 2 (besides weapon shops, as the player rarely has enough money to buy something on the early floors - maybe start the player off with ~20 credits?)

- Decrease the gains from energy boosts so players cannot possibly end the game with ~350 more energy than they started (350 should be enough to create an energy centered build on any mech, without allowing them to kill Terminus with only their energy weapon (unless they try reeeeally hard ))

Of course, this all comes with the usual caveat of 'this is just my opinion based off of my limited experiences'. As I seem to be the only one with a real problem, maybe there is no problem, and my sample size of 4 isn't enough to accurately make statements about balance problems . I'll play a few more rounds to see.

Technically the boomerangs can still be dodged in that situation you mention, heh. But yes, most players wouldnt be able to do that. Though, in the case of an enemy like that, simply pulling them into a better area is the key (since they always chase you). Now, if you're finding a room where the game is generating this situation yet the room does NOT have somewhere you can pull enemies like that into (or similar situations), feel free to report the room here so I can change it. F3 to see the room name (bottom right corner of the box that pops up).

As for the game's difficulty, dont forget what genre this is; by default this type of game is simply harder than the sorts you mention. Heck, many of these games start out quite a bit harder than this one does on Normal (Enter the Gungeon being the most prominent example right now). Isaac is the exception to the rule in that it's easier than the rest of these.

Of course, as I said, I'll be fixing the difficulty as the early floors go. The game shouldnt be drowning you in doom THAT early. I dont want this to be as easy as Isaac, yet it's not supposed to be as murderous as Gungeon when played on Normal (where alot of players cant even beat the FIRST floor...). Gotta keep it at least somewhat accessible. Should be a pretty easy fix since it's mostly just about enemy selection and some rooms being overloaded. I'll be able to get to that on Monday. I'd do it now but I'm at a hotel with my stupid laptop of stupid which cant run the game without exploding.

As far as finding weapons early on, right now, you've got a pretty good chance of finding them with the change to miniboss drops.

Now, as for the blue mech since that's being talked about alot here: Should we be going with a multiplier at all? I mean, one way or another, energy upgrades are pretty easy to come by in this and many of them are quite large, particularly if you get things like the battery or that big red button thing.

What about simply coming up with something different for that mech? I mean, "more energy" isnt even that interesting of an ability, particularly if you're not finding very interesting energy weapons. The blue mech starts with a crappy gun and a familiar. Maybe something that affects familiars?

On Health: I rather agree that starting health/gains should be fiddled with. Redshift in particular is a good example: on Hard, you can quadrouple your health by gaining a single lucky item, and any health item at all is guaranteed to at least double your health. That is a rather sharp survivability spike, even in the smallest case.

I find floor one damage to be perfectly acceptable in the general case. Normalizing room difficulty will fix what remaining problems I have with it.

On Deep Blue: I very much like having a mech focused on energy weapons, though Deep Blue is far too good at it. Reducing the energy multiplier should help. I like the idea of having a mech which relies on it's familiar, but Deep Blue is not that mech as the familiar is only barely impactful, particularly on later floors. It might be an idea to split Deep Blue into two different mechs?

On map revealers: I Only ever get the secret room revealer. To make the others useful at all, there needs to be a reason to not explore the entire map. Maybe some warning system about how scary adjacent rooms are? I imagine that would take engine work though.

On steamrolling: I feel like this is more of a consequence of broken weapons and sometimes Deep Blue than anything else.

New feedback:Harmony is still in the game!

You know how there's always a free item right next to your start? I've taken to restarting if that item is sufficiently trash, as it really makes a big difference. This is probably a behavior that should be discouraged somehow, but I'm not sure if that's feasible. Probably just ignore this feedback.The insta-restarts: +missile capacity (Unless you are using your entire missile capacity in a room, this does nothing1. Big Leaky Battery, sometimes. Unless you run through your energy capacity in 20 seconds2, this item is strictly detrimental. Sometimes that is a good bargain, sometimes it's clearly not.Limiter Removal. I like this item a little bit, it's not detrimental. When I can reset right off the bat- I'd rather anything else that's not on this list.

The level 2: x2 from pickup X passives- these discourage you from actually picking stuff up until level 2. Not a huge deal, mildly obnoxious.

1: Okay, not nothing. It means you start the floor with more missiles IF you are able to refill everything. It saves you from some backtracking. It isn't significant compared to the other passives available. 2:40 seconds for Deep Blue

Got a perfect on Backfire, but also picked up Risky Assassin (the Skeleton Key was nice, too) and got killed by a tiny transport because my fire aura hit it and it shot straight into me.Second run I was doing well, but encountered my long time nemesis, Labyrinth. I think I finally worked out how to deal with its tracer shot, but I took too many hits and wasn't able to hold out at that point.

Can someone look at CMP_EWPlatform? (This is assuming that when you die, hitting F3 still shows the last room you were in) Faux edit: does not appear to be the case; that's a starting room. Huff.

Whatever room it was, was a very claustrophobic room (little maneuvering room) with slow-blinking lasers down center of the accessible side horizontally (I entered bottom leftish, most enemies started on the right half and came though the narrow opening) with several (at least two) very high health kinda small plane looking things (Faceripper?) chasing me with a medium sized red-something (fires four "spears" that leave behind stationary sparkle-mines). Went from ~13 hp +2 shields to dead rather quickly, and this was just after fighting the Aberration floor boss (floor 4) for the first time and getting a Perfect.

My DPS was pretty solid, too, just not against whatever those things were chasing me. Had that attachment that gives +100% base + bullet spread (though still using my Pea Shooter starting gun, but I'd taken the +50% damage perk and bought two +2% damage items). I'd been meaning to hit a weapon's shop, but the only one I saw was on Floor 2, and I didn't have the credits or keys to bother (picked up two 30 credit drones instead; one was the "fires bullet intercepting darts" one). For an idea how how terrible I was doing against those pursuers, at point blank trying to avoid running into them and everything else, I got one of them down to maybe 90% before I died (the other I don't know because they stacked themselves one atop the other). If there was more than two (pretty sure there was, because I kept seeing "enemy died explosions" only to find that I still had two enemies to deal with) then that's a different, but related problem.

Can someone look at CMP_EWPlatform? (This is assuming that when you die, hitting F3 still shows the last room you were in) Faux edit: does not appear to be the case; that's a starting room. Huff.

Whatever room it was, was a very claustrophobic room (little maneuvering room) with slow-blinking lasers down center of the accessible side horizontally (I entered bottom leftish, most enemies started on the right half and came though the narrow opening) with several (at least two) very high health kinda small plane looking things (Faceripper?) chasing me with a medium sized red-something (fires four "spears" that leave behind stationary sparkle-mines). Went from ~13 hp +2 shields to dead rather quickly, and this was just after fighting the Aberration floor boss (floor 4) for the first time and getting a Perfect.

My DPS was pretty solid, too, just not against whatever those things were chasing me. Had that attachment that gives +100% base + bullet spread (though still using my Pea Shooter starting gun, but I'd taken the +50% damage perk and bought two +2% damage items). I'd been meaning to hit a weapon's shop, but the only one I saw was on Floor 2, and I didn't have the credits or keys to bother (picked up two 30 credit drones instead; one was the "fires bullet intercepting darts" one). For an idea how how terrible I was doing against those pursuers, at point blank trying to avoid running into them and everything else, I got one of them down to maybe 90% before I died (the other I don't know because they stacked themselves one atop the other). If there was more than two (pretty sure there was, because I kept seeing "enemy died explosions" only to find that I still had two enemies to deal with) then that's a different, but related problem.

You appear to be still on the old version. The latest build was released as a Beta branch that you need to opt into on steam. Damage boosts have been reduced a lot since they were 50% and 100% The room feedback should still be valid, though, as rooms haven't been changed since the last build.

You appear to be still on the old version. The latest build was released as a Beta branch that you need to opt into on steam. Damage boosts have been reduced a lot since they were 50% and 100% The room feedback should still be valid, though, as rooms haven't been changed since the last build.

Ah, you are correct sir.I looked and there's like 6. A couple of them have version numbers, others do not.

You appear to be still on the old version. The latest build was released as a Beta branch that you need to opt into on steam. Damage boosts have been reduced a lot since they were 50% and 100% The room feedback should still be valid, though, as rooms haven't been changed since the last build.

Ah, you are correct sir.I looked and there's like 6. A couple of them have version numbers, others do not.

Yeah, there should be one marked Beta. It's a bit confusing with them not have versions, but there should be one that is only listed as Beta, which is the latest version.

Played around a couple times, almost made it to the Warden on normal using the blue mech. I encountered a complete and utter lack of HP pickups on level 4 and 5. I went into level 4 with ~10 hp (of 14). Went into level 5 with 7. Combined between the two floors I found maybe 4 health pickups (only one of which was on floor 5).

Found an awesome missile launcher (the 3-way-spitter). In most destructible situations it'll save you a missile, in a few very specific ones it'll cost you a missile, as the AOE is smaller. But definitely fun to use. Also swapped out my guns for other things. At one point I had a grenade launcher, but I think I swapped again but I don't remember to what. My energy weapon I swapped out for the 3 homing spines gun, which was very nice. Firing around corners was very handy.

Finally got a perfect win against Invader (did it the other day, don't remember what I was using).

Only one room complaint. Forgot to grab its name (doh!) and it's more a case of "the room is fine, but the enemy that spawed was not." The room is one of those semi-wide ones with the two horizontal lines of "actually indestructible black blocks" along the top and bottom with a giant area in the center. One of the enemies that spawned just inside that barrier was a new one that I've only seen since v1.500 that fires VERY LARGE shots (that look like fork tines with smaller blue galaxy-shaped ones) that aim right at you when they spawn. Having that thing start directly on the other side of a wall you can't shoot through, two tiles away, is very uncool. Basically "take damage you can't avoid" due to shot size and restricted player movement. I only managed to deal with it because I had the icy burst attachment, so when it pulsed the enemy died (and due to that low health I've never learned its name).

One of the enemies that spawned just inside that barrier was a new one that I've only seen since v1.500 that fires VERY LARGE shots (that look like fork tines with smaller blue galaxy-shaped ones) that aim right at you when they spawn. Having that thing start directly on the other side of a wall you can't shoot through, two tiles away, is very uncool. Basically "take damage you can't avoid" due to shot size and restricted player movement. I only managed to deal with it because I had the icy burst attachment, so when it pulsed the enemy died (and due to that low health I've never learned its name).

I'm not sure which enemy that is, perhaps Fragment? The Cryofreeze Module is currently OP so that probably helped you a lot, too.

One of the enemies that spawned just inside that barrier was a new one that I've only seen since v1.500 that fires VERY LARGE shots (that look like fork tines with smaller blue galaxy-shaped ones) that aim right at you when they spawn. Having that thing start directly on the other side of a wall you can't shoot through, two tiles away, is very uncool. Basically "take damage you can't avoid" due to shot size and restricted player movement. I only managed to deal with it because I had the icy burst attachment, so when it pulsed the enemy died (and due to that low health I've never learned its name).

I'm not sure which enemy that is, perhaps Fragment? The Cryofreeze Module is currently OP so that probably helped you a lot, too.

The shots are....SauronMediumHaloGold shots, maybe? Along with I think WhirlMediumTrueBlue.

* Draco18s examines the XML files

Yeah, looks like it's Fragment. The enemy itself is fine generally, definitely belongs in the category of "jump scare." Just not in that room.Edit: the room is BGS_TheArena